Download New drug offers hope in fight against mad cow disease

New drug offers hope in fight against mad
cow disease
5 August 2015
But research in the American journal Science
Translational Medicine said the new anti-prion
compound appears to be successful in locking
infectious clumps of prions in place.
Researchers said infectious prions replicate by
triggering normal forms of the protein to fold
abnormally and cluster into long chains that are
highly toxic to neurons.
Using structural modeling, researchers conducted
binding studies to study how luminescent conjugated
polythiophenes (LCPs), molecules with a high affinity for
protein aggregates, bind to prions. Two visualizations
from different angles, illustrating the details of the
interaction between LCP and amyloid, are shown. The
two key residues for binding are marked in two different
shades of purple. Credit: Herrmann et al., Science
Translational Medicine (2015)
A new drug compound could lead to a
breakthrough in the fight against bovine
spongiform encephalopathy, the incurable brainwasting disease also known as mad cow disease,
researchers said Wednesday.
Scientists said the new antiprion drug, known as
polythiophene, has proven highly effective in mice
in blocking toxic, misfolded prions.
Scientist Uli Herrmann and his research colleagues
designed new polythiophenes with optimal ability to
immobilize prions, the most promising of which
prolonged survival of prion-infected mice and
hamsters by more than 80 percent.
The mice and hamsters treated with the compound
showed fewer prion clusters and less severe
damage in the brain, the scientists said, suggesting
that it stabilized small clusters of prions and locked
them in place, preventing self-replication.
The encouraging results suggest that
polythiophene could prove to be a potent future
treatment for prion diseases, according to the
study.
Mad cow disease can be fatal to humans who eat
an infected cow's meat.
Scientists believe the disease, including a major
outbreak in Britain in the 1990s, was caused by
using infected parts of cow to make feed for other
cattle.
Experts believe eating meat from infected animals
Prions have been linked to dementia, personality
can trigger the CJD, human variant of the fatal
shifts and other disorders, including CreutzfeldtJakob disease—the human equivalent of mad cow brain-wasting malady.
disease.
Hermann is affiliated with the Institute for Neurology
at the University of Zurich in Switzerland.
At present, no medication has proven effective in
preventing or curing those neurodegenerative
Another key researcher on the study was Anja
ailments.
Boeckmann, at the Institute for Biology and
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Chemical Proteins at the University of Lyon in
France.
More information: Structure-based drug design
identifies polythiophenes as antiprion compounds,
stm.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/ …
scitranslmed.aab1923
© 2015 AFP
APA citation: New drug offers hope in fight against mad cow disease (2015, August 5) retrieved 3 August
2017 from https://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-08-drug-mad-cow-disease.html
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